Elena Sheldon completed her Masters in Applied Linguistics, majoring in Second Language Teaching, at the University of Sydney. She subsequently completed an MA by Research at UNSW. In her thesis she contrasted text structures of discussion genre in English and Spanish at university level. She has also completed her PhD at UNSW which examined research articles (RAs) in English and Spanish as well as RAs written in English by Spanish background speakers in the fields of Applied Linguistics. It drew on two theoretical frameworks, principally on move analysis (Swales, 1990, 2004), complemented by aspects of Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005) within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
